Jonah on Kerry

Okay. I'm feeling a little better after reading Jonah Goldberg's Goldberg File on National Review Online today. Partly because of this line:

The Democrats seem to have succumbed to a terrible bout of wishful thinking, like Michael Moore bringing a condom in his wallet to a Sports Illustrated swimsuit-photo shoot.

And partly because of his trenchant case that the Kerry momentum is a bubble, and that the candidate has some legitimate baggage:

Sure, the American people like guys with military experience. But they don't melt at the sight of them. Bill Clinton defeated two war heroes, and Al Gore served in Vietnam (as a military journalist) and lost. Ideas matter. Policy matters. John Kerry may have lots of foreign-policy experience, but time and again he's culled the wrong lessons from it.

He voted against the first Gulf War, for the second one, and then against the money necessary to keep the peace, i.e., to "nation-build," which was once one of the Democrats' very few real foreign-policy ideas. Ask him on a Tuesday why he voted the way he did and, sure as shinola, he'll give you a different answer than he did on Monday.

He was against almost every weapons system during the Cold War and he sided with the nuclear-freeze movement. He still boasts of fighting "Ronald Reagan's illegal wars in Central America," which is a perfectly snide way of saying that Kerry fought Reagan when Reagan was fighting and winning the Cold War. He was even one of the few Democrats who voted against lifting the arms embargo that was contributing to the mass slaughter of Bosnians. His 1997 book on foreign policy, which he touts as prophetic on the war on terrorism, predicted that various mafias — not al Qaeda, not Islamic fundamentalism — posed the biggest threat to national security. It also underscored Kerry's view that the war on terrorism is nothing more than a law-enforcement problem.

I still think President Bush needs to do better than he did last Sunday on "Meet The Press," but Senator Kerry doesn't look quite so formidable after Jonah dresses him down:

Umm, note to the dreamers: Winning a Democratic primary in a Republican state is not the same thing as winning an election in a Republican state just as winning your fraternity's three-man basketball tournament doesn't make you eligible to play in the NBA.

Posted by jk at February 11, 2004 03:20 PM